Armed Forces Recruitment: Under-18s

Debate between Liz Saville Roberts and Tommy Sheppard

Tuesday 7th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts]

It is my understanding that we are indeed the only NATO member and the only standing member of the UN Security Council to do so.

This is a well-rehearsed argument—forgive me—but it is worth reminding the House that 16-year-olds cannot buy a kitchen knife in a shop, although they can be taught to kill with a bayonet. They can enlist and train in the Army, but the law states that they cannot play “Call of Duty” on an Xbox or watch the Channel 5 documentary series “Raw Recruits: Squaddies at 16”. To watch it online, they would have to tick a box to confirm they were over 18. If it were not so serious, it would be laughable.

Our respect for the armed forces as an institution and for the individuals who represent it makes it easy to treat the institution as beyond question, but I propose strongly that that is dangerous and wrong. There has been no thorough review of the enlistment of minors since at least the time of Deepcut, and I hope today that we can restart that conversation to ensure the welfare of our soldiers and young people across the country.

On the matter of education, I am sure we agree that the educational opportunities that we afford our young people must aim to achieve a common baseline, no matter what their background. The armed forces are, however, exempt from the Department for Education’s standard minimum target for all 16 to 18-year-olds of GCSEs in English and maths at grade C or above. I hope the Minister will be able to explain why our young recruits are not provided with those qualifications, which are deemed essential by all educational employment experts.

The MOD claims that the qualifications it offers—functional skills for numeracy and literacy—are equivalent to GCSEs, but they have been labelled as suffering from major and fundamental flaws by the Department for Education’s own expert review of vocational education, the Professor Wolf report. That finding holds true for all young people, including those who are not academically inclined in any traditional sense and are pursuing vocational, rather than academic, education. I am sure my colleagues agree that young soldiers deserve, as a very minimum, the same educational opportunities as their civilian friends, and certainly nothing less.

The MOD frequently refers to the apprenticeships that young recruits undertake, but closer examination of the curriculum and the content of those courses reveals that, although those apprenticeships may be excellent training for a military career, they are of little value for future civilian employment. Let us bear it in mind that soldiers may be with the infantry until their early 30s, but those young people will need to find work until they are 67, so they need those skills for their long-term welfare.

Those courses consist of modules such as “Tactical advance across battlefield” and “Use of light weaponry”. Young veterans have repeatedly stated that those qualifications were effectively useless in finding employment after they were discharged. That has been borne out repeatedly by Royal British Legion studies on unemployment among ex-service personnel, which show that young veterans are significantly more likely to be unemployed than their civilian peers, and that the lack of qualifications and skills that are transferrable to civilian life is a major factor in that. I hope the Minister will explain how young veterans, the majority of whom are trained for combat roles, not technical ones, can use those highly specialised military skills in future civilian employment.

The MOD has frequently asserted that the Army provides a constructive alternative to young people who otherwise would not be in employment, education or training, or worse. That is an appealing argument, and it would be quite persuasive if there were robust data to support it, but researchers working on my behalf have found none. I regret to say that MOD data indicate quite the opposite.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the problems appears to be that if the Army recruits at 16, it does not have access to the complete pool of 16-year-olds? In fact, there is now a presumption in public policy that education and training should continue beyond 16 to 18. Therefore, the only people available for recruitment at 16 are, to put it mildly, the ones the system has left behind. That gives rise to statistics such as the fact that three quarters of 16-year-old recruits have a reading age of 11 or less. Does that concern her?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

It does concern me. I would like to emphasise the long-term welfare of those young men and women, who need to be equipped to leave the armed forces. If they are serving their country, it is our duty to equip them as well as we can with the skills they will need in future life. They may well be working until they are 67, so literacy and numeracy skills are particularly important to that cohort, which I have taught.

More than a third of under-18 recruits drop out of initial training, and 40% of infantry soldiers who enlisted under the age of 18 are discharged within four years as early service leavers. Having left education early to enlist and without having achieved GCSEs in the Army, those young ex-service personnel will be significantly less qualified than their civilian peers and at increased risk of long-term unemployment and social exclusion.

Such findings are again borne out not by anecdotes, but by British Legion studies. According to a major 2012 study of education in the Army by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, recruits who enlisted at a young age and who had previously been excluded from school were more likely to drop out of the Army than those with a more positive academic record. The same BIS study showed that 48% of recruits who trained at Army Foundation College Harrogate, the junior entry training site, had left the Army within four years.

Without doubt, individual positive anecdotes exist and will always inspire, but there is scant evidence that, as a rule, the Army can turn around young people who have not engaged well at school. Will the Minister provide any data to support the hypothesis that enlisting disadvantaged adolescents in the Army is an effective way to secure their long-term engagement in education and employment? Will he provide any analysis of how cost-effective that strategy is in comparison with, for example, greater investment in specialised education and social-support services for at-risk young people? We have other institutions such as further education colleges and other training centres to help those young people, who may as well be in the cadets at the same time as receiving a decent education to equip them for future life.

On combat roles and the channelling of the youngest recruits into the most dangerous roles, I intended to discuss the MOD policy to seek under-18s “particularly for the infantry”, which has the highest fatality and injury rate of any major branch of the Army. In the interests of time, however, I simply ask the Minister to explain on what basis his Department decided to restrict the choice of roles for the youngest recruits to frontline combat roles only, rather than giving them the opportunity to enlist in the full range of technical roles.

Following a damning report in October last year by medical charity Medact, I want also to touch briefly on the long-term health impacts on young people recruited under the age of 18. The report revealed such recruits to be more vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol abuse, self-harm and suicide. There is a 64% increased risk of suicide among men under the age of 20 in the Army as compared with the wider population.

Many in the House and in the country are deeply proud of the armed forces and supportive of the institution as a whole. We would be failing in our duties, however, were we not to hold up their policies to scrutiny. The overwhelming majority of nations worldwide enlist from the age of 18 or above. Welbeck College in Loughborough provides an outstanding residential sixth-form college that, without the burden of formal enlistment before 18, educates young people intending to pursue a military career, with evident advantages to the students and to the institution.

I hope that the debate will open the door to a fruitful, frank and detailed discussion of how improvements can be made to policy. It is not in the interests of young people or of the Army to continue assuming that the status quo is the best possible model without a thorough examination of the evidence and consideration of alternatives.

Only 52% of the population voted to leave the European Union, but today Parliament is acting on it. In 2014, according to a nationwide Ipsos MORI poll, 77% of respondents who expressed a view supported raising the minimum enlistment age to 18 or above. Will the Minister respect the wishes of the population and the recommendations of child rights, health and education experts, and commit to a thorough independent review of policy?